Free Murder with Fried Chicken and Waffles (Mahalia Watkins Soul Food Mystery) by A.L. Herbert Page B

containers. I hear Laura’s voice in the back supervising the kitchen, and Tacy is rolling silverware at one of the back tables. Everyone is scurrying around getting ready for the Sunday brunch crowd. Nothing seems out of the ordinary—nothing except for the huge knot in my stomach and the eggshells I’m walking on waiting for someone to rush in the restaurant screaming about a dead body.
    Clearly the body has not been found. Wavonne and I left it next to the Dumpster—not behind it or in it . . . just next to it. You’d think someone would have taken out the trash or made a delivery and seen the body by now. But it is a Sunday, which isn’t a big day for deliveries, and most of the businesses in the shopping center don’t open until ten. It’s only nine now.
    I say hi to my staff and make my way to kitchen. As usual, Laura has everything under control. I see eggs being prepped for omelets, fruit being sliced for garnish, potatoes being chopped for home fries, and Laura is in the far corner standing next to one of my industrial mixers, which is whipping up the batter for our salty/sweet cheese nips. Sunday brunch is the one and only seating at which we don’t serve my grandmother’s cornbread. Instead, we offer a complimentary basket of salty/sweet cheese nips, a concoction I developed on my own using Grandmommy’s drop biscuit recipe as a base. We mix up flour, shortening, and other dry ingredients with a healthy helping of Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese. Then we drop the slightly larger-than-bite-size biscuits by spoon onto a cookie sheet. After we bake them to a golden brown, we brush them with salted butter, let them cool a bit before sprinkling them with course sugar crystals, and get them to the tables while they’re still warm. They are a challenge to execute. If we put the sugar on too early, the crystals will melt, and, if we wait too long, the crystals won’t stick, and we end up serving cold biscuits to my patrons. But the customers rave about them and always ask for the recipe (which I’d give them over my dead body), so they are worth all the trouble.
    “How’s it going?” I ask Laura.
    “Good. The temperature is off in oven number two. I called the repair shop, but they can’t get anyone out here today, so we’re down to two ovens until then.”
    “Okay. I’ll give Harry a call at the repair shop, and see if I can sweet-talk him into getting someone out here today. Anything else going on?”
    “No. Everything is pretty well under control.”
    I want to ask her if she’s sure . . . if she’s sure there’s nothing else going on. Or if she saw anything suspicious when she came in this morning, but I decide it’s best to keep my mouth shut.
    “Great. I’m going to go look at the reservations on the computer and see what kind of crowds we can expect this morning.”
    When I first opened Sweet Tea, I didn’t take reservations. As anyone in the restaurant business can tell you, taking reservations creates a host of problems. You have the no-shows whom you’ve held a table for, the folks who show up late and get an attitude when you’ve given their table away, and the diners who linger at their table well beyond the allotted time for which we plan for them to be there (we call them “campers”), which makes us run behind with other reservations. It’s much easier and more profitable to take customers on a first-come, first-serve basis, but as my restaurant became more popular and waits of up to two hours were not unheard of on Friday and Saturday nights, I started getting more and more requests from patrons for me to start taking reservations, so I eventually decided to reach for some middle ground and began offering a limited number of reservations, but still make most tables available on a first-come, first-serve basis. This way, as long as customers call far enough in advance, they can usually get a reservation for their preferred seating time and avoid a long wait.
    As I make my